by Riley Mac.
I came home from hosting Lily Lady’s New York book launch branded with a quickie sticker on my Timbs that I kept there until it peeled off on its own fruition. I thought about the quickie thong I didn’t take because I don’t wear thongs and how I should have taken one anyway. I thought about what a capitalist Lily is. Not in the malignant sense, but in that once a Tumblr teen always a Tumblr teen, self as commodity as currency way. I think a lot of artists/writers/etc. are in tune with this necessary form of self-promotion in this day and age, but try to avoid eye contact with it. They try to do it while maintaining humility and aloofness as a part of their image. Lily does not give a fuck. They are unapologetically flamboyant and horny for a reaction, and so is quickie.
I read quickie when I got home from the launch. Laying in bed, one hand in my pants, one hand spreading quickie open. I took it page by page, didn’t skim or skip ahead. Left side, photograph taken by Lily; snapshot of their world. Right side, brief but punchy little poem. I ran through its 130ish pages in one sitting (and I’m a slow, lazy reader). It was born to be run through but revisited.
From its baby pink, so-girly-its-camp cover, quickie aims to ostracize the academic, stuffy, washed up poetry elitist to embrace the new school; the queer, feminine, maybe slutty and messy, hedonistic. Lily is not the first to do this, but they do it well, decked out in pink at their launch, holding court from the driver’s seat of a child-sized Barbie Jeep.
quickie thrives in its most voyeuristic moments, tempting the reader to acknowledge the perverted. Lily does not do this with a soft touch, but avoids being heavy-handed. For instance, on one page you’ll find an elementary school class photo of Lily. Four pages later, a photo of (presumably) adult Lily’s stomach spritzed with cum. It’s impossible to ignore, even if subconsciously, that this little girl and this cum-covered body are the same subject turned object. It’s an homage to an era of internet culture of the pastel Lolita, pro-ana, the glamorization of mental illness and attempted suicide, teenage girls recreating the male gaze; a sort of post-feminism (for lack of a better word) that rejected the idea of self-empowerment, but instead, an innate empowerment in the art of self-degredation. I would argue that this era was less self-aware than its contemporaries, but certainly laid the groundwork for those seeking to queer it and push it further. Lily addresses the what and the why; and if the sexualization of feminine youth and its fucked consequences are latent in our culture, why not throw a party about it?
CLICK HERE TO BUY LILY LADY’S BOOK ‘QUICKIE’!
At the surface, quickie’s allure resides in the aesthetic and Lily Lady is great at this sport. It’s what Lily was raised on and what quickie’s audience was raised on. The great aesthetician, and one of my favorite poets, Lana del Rey, was ridiculed for most of her career for hiding behind a caricature and relying on persona. It wasn’t until her sixth studio album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, that critics changed their tune, claiming maturity in her lyricism. But was it maturity, or had they simply caught up with her? I swear it’s the latter. There’s something to be said about a musician or a writer whose work is highly aestheticized with minimal visual representation. Lana has music videos, Lily has photographs in quickie, but it’s supplementary; the aesthetic does not wholly rely on the visual. A handful of poems in quickie are simply lists of things, phrases, etc., but their specificity paints this world. The poem love lists “subway series / grocery aisles / shag carpet”, among other things and images. Aestheticizing, but never shallow. It’s obvious that these images are deeply personal, sentimental, and again for the voyeur in me, the voyeur in the reader; it makes our eyes perk up.
A poem like hall pass lists celebrities and characters that presumably the subject would ask their monogamous partner for a pass to fuck. This poem seems less random juxtaposed with the most longform poem in the book, fear factor. fear factor is another list that laments the subject’s fears, among them “monogamy…nonmonogamy”; both, and.
Lily will kill me for saying this, but quickie’s thesis is growing pains and a plight to find a silver lining in chaos and confusion. It’s more earnest than it would like you to believe and tries to distract you from that with comedy. the best part of the house show reads “when it ends” because house shows suck, it’s funny! But I don’t buy it. That house show didn’t exist in the present day. It’s nostalgia mining – a dissociate. Like one of my favorite poems in quickie, next life: “to be a white stoner in a 90s movie / forever high school / forever high”, etc; the subject is so dissociated that they’re yearning for a caricature of youth – not even the real thing. It’s dark if you pay attention.
It’s a quickie (haha) at face value, but reveals more with each read. And that’s true to Lily. Always moving their hands, always embodying something chaotic, always making me roll my eyes. It’s all real, it’s all love.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH LILY LADY’S DGAF.WORLD NSFW TAPE ‘BRUSH YO TEETH’ BY TVX FILMS
